Bunny and Charles Burson Visiting Artist Lecture: Beatriz Cortez  

Untimely Communities and Nonhuman Worlds: Reflections on the Survival of Seeds

Multidisciplinary artist and scholar Beatriz Cortez will discuss her explorations of simultaneous and converging temporalities with a focus on human–nonhuman collaborations and potential imaginaries of the future contained in seeds. She examines the concept of untimely communities, or communities formed out of joint with time, and the possibility of forming communities with other living begins and with matter. Cortez’s sculpture Chultún El Semillero (2022) is featured in the exhibition Seeds: Containers of a World to Come. 

This lecture, part of the Sam Fox School’s Spring 2025 Public Lecture Series, is free and open to the public.

About the Artist

Beatriz Cortez’s (Salvadoran, b. 1970) work explores simultaneous and converging temporalities, from the deep past to distant futures. Drawing on her own experience of migration—she left El Salvador and immigrated to the United States in 1989—and an expansive philosophical framework, her projects look to ancient, futuristic and object-based models to address urgent issues of the present. She earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2015) and a PhD in Latin American literature from Arizona State University (1999). Cortez is associate professor of art at the University of California, Davis. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2023); Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA (2023); Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2021); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2019); and Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA (2016). Selected group exhibitions include the 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, Tufts University Art Galleries, Boston (2022); FUTURES, Smithsonian Arts + Industries, Washington, DC (2022); The Word for World is Forest, CCA Wattis Art Institute, San Francisco (2020); and In Plain Sight, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019). Cortez’s work is in the collections of the Ford Foundation, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Michigan State University Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; Museo Comunitario Kaqjay, Patzicía, Guatemala; and Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, San Salvador, among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Davis, CA.